Solar MaximumSueyeun Juliette Lee

If Solar Maximum’s speculative fictions are more concerned with presents than futures, its rigorous calm is deeply disquieted, its systematic clarity vying with diffusion, blindness. Is it a reckoning of human success or error that the cannibalistic clouds over Lee’s blanched landscapes are full of weather and information? That they break themselves down as a body and communications must? Why poetry otherwise? These are stunning poems written to haunt a house we’re in the process of building or, in another light, gently dismantling. — Douglas Kearney

A “great disturbance.” A “magnetic delivery.” Hold your breath in the bathtub:to “alter weather patterns.” To belie: a “longing,” the “discrepancy,” how the light itself accrues a “stop-motion” brilliance in the moment, or era, before it arrives. How does the sun “signal” to citizens and non-citizens below? What is happening? Lee has written a book that melts, freezes, then melts again: a set of “kinetic potentials.” Both syntax and the animal body leave their residues throughout this work, becoming, in turn, modes of fluorescence, exposure, a way to time the “solar maximum.” As Lee writes: “The prints in the ground I track for hours lead me to the place I was taught to call home.” Every page has something on it that was both “severe instant” or “coronal flare.” These extraordinary sentences or lines. But at the same time the work feels grounded in a kind of extraordinary praise for the excruciating beauty of planetary life, even as it— as it does — dissolves. — Bhanu Kapil

About the AuthorSueyeun Juliette Lee grew up three miles from the CIA. She edits Corollary Press, a chapbook series devoted to multi-ethnic innovative writing, and writes poetry reviews for The Constant Critic. Her books include That Gorgeous Feeling (Coconut Press) and Underground National (Factory School) as well as numerous chapbooks. A Pew Fellow in the Arts for Literature, she has held residencies for poetry and video art at Kunstnarhuset Messen (Norway), Hafnarborg (Iceland), and UCross Foundation in Wyoming.

If Solar Maximum’s speculative fictions are more concerned with presents than futures, its rigorous calm is deeply disquieted, its systematic clarity vying with diffusion, blindness. Is it a reckoning of human success or error that the cannibalistic clouds over Lee’s blanched landscapes are full of weather and information? That they break themselves down as a body and communications must? Why poetry otherwise? These are stunning poems written to haunt a house we’re in the process of building or, in another light, gently dismantling. — Douglas Kearney

A “great disturbance.” A “magnetic delivery.” Hold your breath in the bathtub:to “alter weather patterns.” To belie: a “longing,” the “discrepancy,” how the light itself accrues a “stop-motion” brilliance in the moment, or era, before it arrives. How does the sun “signal” to citizens and non-citizens below? What is happening? Lee has written a book that melts, freezes, then melts again: a set of “kinetic potentials.” Both syntax and the animal body leave their residues throughout this work, becoming, in turn, modes of fluorescence, exposure, a way to time the “solar maximum.” As Lee writes: “The prints in the ground I track for hours lead me to the place I was taught to call home.” Every page has something on it that was both “severe instant” or “coronal flare.” These extraordinary sentences or lines. But at the same time the work feels grounded in a kind of extraordinary praise for the excruciating beauty of planetary life, even as it— as it does — dissolves. — Bhanu Kapil

About the AuthorSueyeun Juliette Lee grew up three miles from the CIA. She edits Corollary Press, a chapbook series devoted to multi-ethnic innovative writing, and writes poetry reviews for The Constant Critic. Her books include That Gorgeous Feeling (Coconut Press) and Underground National (Factory School) as well as numerous chapbooks. A Pew Fellow in the Arts for Literature, she has held residencies for poetry and video art at Kunstnarhuset Messen (Norway), Hafnarborg (Iceland), and UCross Foundation in Wyoming.